60 Per Cent of Britons Reject Higher Taxes to Fulfil BoJo’s Green Agenda

LONDON, ENGLAND - APRIL 22: Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks during the openi
Justin Tallis - WPA Pool/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

A firm majority of the British public oppose paying higher taxes in order to fulfil Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s leftist green agenda of transforming the UK into a net-zero carbon emitter by the year 2050.

Some sixty per cent of Britons said they rejected the idea of paying more taxes to fund the Build Back Better green agenda of the supposedly Conservative government. The same number of respondents said that they did not believe that the green subsidies would benefit them personally.

A further 70 per cent revealed that they were concerned with the rising cost of energy during the Christmas holiday period, according to the poll commissioned by campaign group Net Zero Watch, reported by The Telegraph.

Commenting on the poll, Conservative MP and chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group in the House of Commons, Craig Mackinlay told the broadsheet: “As I’ve been saying for some time, I didn’t become a Conservative to make my constituents colder and poorer. It’s clear, looking at these survey figures, that the British public are not signed up to the Government’s plans.

“They feel they haven’t been consulted or had their say. The majority don’t feel that government grants for air pumps or electric cars are either relevant to them, or more fundamentally needed to nudge them towards unreliable technologies they don’t want. And there is real worry about the ever-increasing costs of energy bills this winter.”

Tory MP and head of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group’s steering committee, Steve Baker added: “The cost of net-zero could deliver a political crisis greater than the Poll Tax, and these figures show that the Government is heading straight for such an eventuality.

“The British people are clearly deeply unhappy about paying higher taxes to help reach net-zero targets and feel they haven’t been consulted about the choices the Government are making.

In October, household energy bills hit record highs in Britain, as the price cap set by the nation’s energy regulator, Ofgem, rose to an average of £1,277 for dual fuel (energy and gas) bills, The Guardian reported.

The price cap, which was put in place in 2019 in order to protect the bills of millions of Britons, is expected to continue increasing until at least 2023, with some analysts predicting that it could reach £2,000 by April when Ofgem is set to review the price cap.

Britain’s fourth-biggest supplier, EDF Energy told the Financial Times last week that the cap could “easily” surpass the £2,000 mark by October.

According to the National Energy Action charity, the increases in energy costs could plunge 6 million households into fuel poverty unless the government steps in to lower the increase of the energy price cap.

Others, including Brexit’s Nigel Farage, have argued for the government to scrap the heavy taxes placed on energy bills used to subsidise supposedly green energy alternatives, which currently accounts for around 25.5 per cent of the average household’s energy bills.

Mr Farage also called for the government to abolish the five per cent VAT placed on energy, a holdover from when the UK was a member of the European Union.

Boris Johnson had written that scrapping the tax would be a benefit to the public of leaving the European Union, but now he is in power — and collecting the money generated by taxes — the Prime Minister seems to have forgotten his pledge.

In a video released on Sunday, Brexit leader Nigel Farage said that cost of living has now become the “key issue” in British politics.

The Brexiteer called on the public to lobby their MPs to remove the taxes going to green subsidies on energy bills, saying: “Parliament the media are completely out of touch with ordinary folk.

Farage said that the government’s green agenda is “great for the rich,” but said that it is “catastrophic for everybody else and in environmental terms, given what India and China are doing, it makes no difference whatsoever.”

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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